Gender issues are everywhere

When asked why it is important to study the gender aspects of EU politics, most academics involved in the subject will sigh and trot out a well-rehearsed and oft-repeated answer. It is a question they are almost tired of dealing with, even from colleagues who should know better.

Johanna Kantola, of the University of Helsinki, recalls the reaction when she started work on her book “Gender and the European Union”. “When I mentioned it to my political science colleagues in the department and at different conferences, they would often ask me: ‘What is there to study? What has the EU got to do with gender?’ I was always stunned.”

Since the book came out only in 2010, this is hardly ancient history. Other specialists agree that the issue remains marginalised. “Gender scholarship itself has grown quite substantially,” says Roberta Guerrina, who heads the school of politics at the University of Surrey. “But then, if you look at mainstream European studies, you can see that it has not been adopted, broadly speaking, as a systematic method for the analysis of the EU.”

The most obvious reason for studying gender and the EU is that European integration has had a substantial impact on working conditions and equal opportunities for women. “It is a significant area that needs to be studied and understood,” says Guerrina.

But the interest runs deeper than this. “Particularly after 1992, the process of European integration has had a profound impact on European societies – and this automatically means also on gender relations and gender regimes,” says Gabriele Abels of the Institute of Political Science at the University of Tübingen. “It’s important to look not just at the policy areas which gender researchers always look at, like employment and social policy, but also at areas which at first sight may seem less gendered, like research or agriculture or foreign policy.”

Diverse topics

This is a task that Abels and co-editor Joyce Marie Mushaben tackled in their book, “Gendering the European Union”, published this year. In addition to the subjects mentioned, its chapters cover issues as diverse as the EU’s gender mainstreaming policy, enlargement, the Common Agriculture Policy, migration and citizenship.

The argument that gender issues are everywhere is exactly the point these academics want to get across. “Not to use gender as part of our academic and intellectual tool-kit is to leave out a significant proportion of the values and principles that organise political and economic relations, and also the interface between the domestic sphere and the public sphere,” says Guerrina.

She goes on to argue that the techniques developed in gender studies are particularly sensitive to “strategic silences” in political systems. “It’s not just about men and women, necessarily, but it’s about power structures and how these power structures consolidate inequalities and social exclusion.” There’s even a certain amount of pride in the complexity of the subject. “When you study gender you do double the amount of work,” says Kantola. “You study and research the mainstream, and then you research the gender aspects of it. It’s not that you work only on women.”

Acceptance

Yet the perception that still equates gender studies with women’s studies is one of the barriers to wider acceptance. “Some people see it as marginal: why study ‘only’ women? Other people see it as irrelevant, and still others see it as dangerous and ideological. And all these reasons mix and make it hard to pursue the point.”

For Petra Debusscher, a post-doctoral fellow in the Centre for EU Studies at Ghent University, the gender imbalance in academia itself is partly to blame. “Ninety per cent of the people doing gender studies are women – I don’t know why. I think it could be interesting for men as well. But, of course, this has an impact. Men tend to find studying it less important, and unfortunately male domination of academia is not a thing of the past.”

In the absence of radical change in the upper reaches of academia, gender mainstreaming within European studies is most likely to take place from below, with the next generation of academics. “It should be taught at the very basic level and then its position would improve,” says Kantola.

Teaching material is a problem in this respect. “The majority of text-books, even if they look at social policy, are often completely gender-blind,” says Abels. And while the issue is taught in some universities, this often reflects a commitment by an individual academic rather than a structural change in the department. For example, Debusscher teaches a course on gender and the EU to master’s students at Ghent that would not exist without her. “I’m not on the tenure track, so the moment I cannot stay it will disappear again.”

Academics interested in gender issues need to venture out of their comfort zone. “There is a degree of ghettoisation that gender scholars also engage in, whereby we tend to publish in gender journals,” says Guerrina. “We need to be bolder, to approach mainstream journals and engage with the key concerns of the discipline.” Debusscher agrees: “You have to speak to other disciplines, because they are not going to speak to you.”

All feel that current events provide plenty of scope for this to occur. “Gendering the euro crisis will be very very important,” says Abels. “It has the potential to change the EU in substantial ways, so looking at the socio-economic effects from a gender perspective is certainly one of the key issues.”